The World Wide Web is officially old enough that we can trace its rich and unique history.
A story that was coming at full speed to change human daily life as we knew it. Within a few years of the World Wide Web, nothing would be the same.
The very discreet revolution we finally said the internet worked like a siphon, an unprecedented and unimaginable force of change that swept everything.
But who were the protagonists of all this? And in times when the internet did not seem like a good idea to everyone. Just ask Bill Gates about it!
What were the websites that forged the landscape, effectively cementing the foundations of the internet? Many, many, one would answer, and it is a pity to leave without mentioning websites that changed their category.
With the awareness of the limits of such a list, let's look at a number of the most important websites that made surfing worthwhile. That's since Tim Berners-Lee suggested to CERN what he called "WorldWideWeb" (one word).
Eventually scamming what would magically change the world on its own. Yes, the first ever website! Which rose on August 6, 1991 to bring a colossal revolution to the universe. Such an incision that no one expected, not even the "father" of the World Wide Web...
What started out as a series of lists of a handful of Usenet users was about to become the ultimate milestone when it comes to "that guy playing there, baby." One of the first databases to show what scary things the new medium could do.
The Internet Movie Database remains a key historical recording tool for him cinema, television and gaming and few realize how old it is. And how important for the internet adventure itself, giving voice to the simple cinephile and the passive viewer until then.
Those who grew up in the 90s and experienced firsthand the internet boom will remember that in those years the internet simply meant Yahoo. The ultimate search engine, the all-powerful search engine without which you did not know exactly what to do in the digital environment.
It was created by two Stanford graduates (Jerry Yang and David Filo) and was uploaded online in January 1994 as an index of hand-picked web pages (that is, without algorithms). A little later, computer-generated indexes would come in handy, something like AltaVista (1995) and Google (1998), leaving Yahoo to deal with email and chat rooms.
It was in 1994 that Jeff Bezos launched the first online bookstore, which would later become a regular grocery store and a real e-commerce boulder. THE Amazon not only made e-shopping popular and popular later, it also gave the user a step to upload product reviews, paving the way for TripAdvisor websites.
Without Amazon.com, people would still be reluctant to buy things from digital entities. Bezos made us shop online with his two innovations: one-click ordering (1999) and free shipping (2005)…
It was September 1995 when developer Pierre Omidyar launched his website, AuctionWeb, which he later renamed eBay and became the main person responsible for turning the housewife into a businessman. There are not many websites that can boast that they have created their own momentum on the internet.
Simple to use and a demon in the communication of the involved parties, eBay showed the real power of the internet, the self-regulating operation of the electronic communities. At the same time creating a new professional category, everyday people who live by selling products on its website…
Free email for everyone and accessible emails from everywhere, this is what Jack Smith and Sabeer Bhatia promised to humanity in 1996. And their promise was so strong that next year the website would buy Microsoft for $ 400 million (in 1997!).
Before Hotmail, when you opened an email, it was deleted from the host server, which meant that you could only see it again from the computer you had opened. Hotmail is what changed this, providing universal access to your email from any computer with an internet connection. Without Hotmail (which merged with Outlook in 2013), email would not have such an impact.
The Netflix started in 1997 as an online service that mailed to your home the envelope of the movie of your choice. Thus relieving its users from the standard visit to the neighborhood video club. Far from what it is today, however, it has shown the terrifying power of the internet in this area as well.
Later, when it became a streaming service, it almost killed cable TV and is now a true boulder of home entertainment. Something no one would have imagined the year of salvation 1997…
Η Google has now invaded every aspect of the whole phenomenon we call the internet. Whatever you do online, you interact with a Google service or product, even when you do not know it. Every time you watch a YouTube video or read a blog on Blogger, Google is there. And in hundreds of other things of course.
It all started in 1998 as another search engine. A complete website that was coming to bring the real revolution in the way people used the internet. This machine served the right results, turning the internet into the ultimate place to search for information.
The famous PageRank algorithm of Page and Brin was the one that saved the internet from the chaos of the first days, making internet searches accurate and popular in the end…
Today we have social networking to bring our thoughts online, but there were times when if you wanted to be heard out there, you had to become a blogger. Both were the boulders here, GeoCities, which has been running since 1994, and the real revolution, Blogger.
Blogger makes it even easier to set up a personal blog and let people know what you ate for lunch or what your boyfriend did to you. Everyone needed a step now and Blogger provided it in a remarkably simple way, without having to know code and stuff like that. It was the platform that turned the personal view into the crown jewel of the web.
It was acquired by Google in 2003 and continues to exist in our world. Like the historic GeoCities, acquired by Yahoo in 1999 and still living as Yahoo! GeoCities, although you rarely hear it nowadays…
If Amazon was the one to establish the world's reviews, Wikipedia took user-generated content to the next level, scrawling an online encyclopedia where everyone could contribute their knowledge. And while this would seem like hell, with mistakes and deliberate lies, the Wikipedia he quickly found a way to overcome it, self-correcting misleading content.
It has been and remains one of the key tools for the democratization of knowledge, an authentic embodiment of all that the internet has promised us from the beginning. User-to-user information, always free. Millions of entries now in hundreds of languages and for all kinds of subjects, this is a huge feat of human cooperation, volunteerism and generosity…
In the same way that Napster sparked the craze of sharing files from user to user, making it easy to find MP3s (which established the awesome MP3.com in 1998), and infuriating the planet's record labels, something similar did Pirate Bay with downloading. Kosmakis' huge database suddenly became accessible to everyone, despite the fact that most of what was done on his pages was and remains illegal.
And while the record labels toppled Napster and its offshoots, the Pirate bay it was to prove to be more resilient, operating in all its majestic illegality for 15 whole years. Its diabolical endurance is considered to be its best feature and although it is no longer the ultimate choice for torrents out there, it was what established the practice of sharing content among ordinary mortals.
Facebook was not the first social networking site, not even the industry's most popular platform. People have had MySpace unleashed since 2003. Only in the end it was Facebook that would define the concept of social networking, one of the most basic aspects of today's internet.
Many things now happen or start from Facebook and its role in society is almost self-evident. And all this from a university database created by Mark Zuckerberg from his room. Before it turns into an excellent advertising tool and sends its torment to the heavens of the market. In 2005 came Reddit and in 2006 Twitter and tied the sweet of social networking with the above…
Another idea that started in a garage by three former PayPal employees (which, incidentally, would not exist without eBay), was to become the cornerstone of e-entertainment. Such that Google had to pay $ 1,6 billion to acquire it!
Now humanity uploads more than 10 hours of material every minute on the platform and it is clear that for every search on the Google bar you will find a video that matches the keywords.
Before YouTube, there were not many options to watch a video online. You may have met someone, but the bandwidth was expensive. That's what he did YouTube, provided free space for everyone to upload their material. And that was the big secret of his unique success.
There were times when contact with pornography was a difficult affair. You either had to find a "Playboy" curtain or use all your creativity to take a sneak peek at obscene and immoral content. And it was PornHub who changed that, finally making porn free and mainstream.
Its impact on the porn industry is now considered catastrophic, but it has left its mark on the modern world and the way humanity consumes "pink" content.